Budget best practices
Review the recommended best practices for setting advertising budgets.
Read time 3 minutesLast updated 2 hours ago
Optimize budgets
Automated bidding is one option for controlling your daily campaign spend. Automated bidding dynamically adjusts your bids throughout the day to optimize how your budget is used. You can use both CPM and CPI billing with Automated bidding. When you use cost per install (CPI) billing without Automated bidding, successful campaigns will occasionally spend their campaign budget too quickly when they have several successful days in one week. Automated bidding can help you maintain budget limits on a weekly basis. If your campaign overspends one day, Automated bidding adjusts your budget for the next day to compensate. This ensures your campaign stays within budget on a weekly basis. When you set your daily budget with Automated bidding, aim for one-seventh of the amount you want your campaign to spend in a week. Use this calculation for both CPI-billed and CPM-billed campaigns. Automated bidding also optimizes your bids so your budget is used more efficiently. By adjusting your bids based on campaign performance, Automated bidding maximizes the number of installs your campaign can achieve in a day.Optimize budgets with ROAS campaigns
ROAS (return on ad spend) campaigns also benefit from Automated bidding. When you run a ROAS campaign, with CPI billing, the campaign automatically uses Automated bidding. This bidding strategy helps improve campaign performance for campaigns that are constrained by their daily cap. By optimizing how your bids are placed, using CPI billing in these campaigns can increase your observed return on ad spend (ROAS). For more information about Automated bids, refer to the Bids documentation.Important
Changing your budget might have an impact on how accurately the daily budget can be respected on a weekly basis. If you change your budget mid-campaign, it will take approximately seven days for the system to accurately respect the new budget on a weekly basis.
Recommendations and strategy
When you start adding budgets to your campaign, Unity offers recommendations for your minimum campaign budget and minimum daily budget. These recommendations are based on the billing type, the number of creatives assigned, and the countries the campaign is targeting. Before the Unity algorithm can deliver your first campaign results, it needs to explore your campaign and creatives. To ensure that the algorithm has sufficient funds for the exploration process, set a campaign budget that's at least five times the value of your daily budget. For campaigns billed on impressions (CPM), Unity recommends you start with the minimum budget recommendations offered in the dashboard. These recommendations are designed to mitigate the risk of overspending during the exploration phase with tCPI bidding. After the exploration phase, you can increase or remove the daily budget limit to enable higher impression volumes. Consider the following approaches to fit your user acquisition strategy as needed:Budget strategy | Description |
|---|---|
| Unlimited campaign spend | Leave both the daily budget and campaign budget fields empty. |
| Limited campaign budget but unlimited daily spend | Enter an overall campaign budget, but leave the daily budget empty. |
| Limited daily spend but unlimited campaign budget | Enter a daily budget, and enter a very high value as the overall campaign budget. Because a campaign budget is required when using a daily budget, setting the overall campaign budget very high is the best way to achieve unlimited campaign budget. |
| Limited campaign budget and daily budget | Enter both a daily budget and campaign budget. |
| Limited daily budgets of targeted countries | Enter daily budgets for each targeted country individually. |
| Shared daily budget across a country group | Enter one daily budget shared across multiple countries in a group. Unity's system distributes spend within the group automatically based on performance. |
Note
When you activate a daily budget for your campaign, you are required to set up a campaign budget as well.
Multi-country daily budget best practices
Multi-country budgets allow you to share a campaign's daily spending limit across multiple countries. Group budgets are useful when you target markets with lower individual spend volumes. Unity's optimization system distributes spend across the countries in a group in real time, prioritizing where bids win and conversions happen. For setup instructions, refer to Set daily budgets.Use country group daily budgets strategically
Country group daily budgets can help you with your advertising strategy. Consider using country group daily budgets in the following situations:Situation | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Multi-country campaigns targeting countries with lower individual spend volumes | When individual countries can't support a meaningful daily budget on their own, grouping them allows the shared budget to go to whichever countries are performing best on a given day. |
| Improved budget utilization efficiency | When you prefer Unity's system to automatically optimize where spend goes within a region, grouping countries enables this automation, rather than managing per-country caps manually. |
| Simplified budget management | When you want to reduce the overhead of monitoring and adjusting budgets across many individual countries, grouping countries makes adjustments easier. |
Tip
The recommended best practice is to group countries with similar advertising costs (CPI) or revenue potential (ARPU or ROAS).